What I Pondered (and did) Today...

That if the universe is having its time of the month, that would explain a lot. Or that perhaps someone built a CERN-style collider long before we got around to it - somewhere near the purple spot on the map.

My Uncle in Law sent me a link to Facebook. And Facebook was down. My Uncle in Law broke Facebook.

Pondered, then downloaded, Slacker Uprising my Michael Moore. But watched the Heroes Season 3 Pilot on Hulu instead.

Looked at a new tool for facilitating code reviews - Microsoft SharedView - to which Erik sent me a link.

Why I was so productive and on top of things yesterday, despite 8 hours of meetings, and so off my game today, despite fewer hours of meetings.

Thought about what I was going to check out at the Twin Cities Code Camp. Maybe I'll check out YouTube with Silverlight just so Jeff Brand has to worry that someone in the audience is a friend of his old girlfriend. Wondered which ones Erik is going to check out.

Finalized some plans for riding the Gandy Dancer trail with Kyle and Ming this weekend, which my be my last real bicycling ride of the season.

Finished a conversation with Erik about the slow performance of installing Xobni on my laptop, and that when I uninstalled they asked if it was because of the performance, and would I like to be notified when it improves, as well as another conversation about S+S, and whether it's for real, or Microsoft bunk designed to continue to sell desktop software. My opinion was that it's bunk, there's more of a future in services, but that at the moment it's a reality (at least for me - I'm still disconnected from the internet and often prefer the speed of desktop software). That led to a discussion about S+S vs. Software as a Service (SaaS), vs. Fat Client, vs. SOA, vs. Hybrid Peformance Models (basically S+S) and how to get from the fatty to the desired architecture.

Pinged a VP (more like two VPs) for a list of red wines to use as appropriate gifts for managerial types.

Checked out Calais, a semantic markup engine (and various tools) by Thomson Reuters. You can drop anything into their doc viewer just to try it out. Either it needs improvement, or I need to improve my writing (likely the later, as Mean Mr. Mustard made a joke about my pronouns a post or three ago), because when I uploaded all the text on the front page of my blog, it tagged "her" and "she" as Sarah Palin in almost every case in this post, which is about my dog Sandy dying from old age.


Read RFK Jr.'s piece in the LA Times about Sarah Palin being Dick Cheney...with lipstick.

Whether Glubble would be good for Eryn and decided maybe I'll just stick with the computer in a public place and no shutting the door. Otherwise I don't care to micromanage her internet use.

Whether I wanted to read Cornelia Funke's Inkheart before it was released as a Brendan Fraser film in January. I do, so I picked up a copy at Barnes and Noble after work, along with Halloween Mad Libs as she's busy copying paragraphs of text to practice writing lately, and a copy of Absurdistan for myself because it's been a while since I read something fun. But forgot to pick up Mental Floss, Forbidden Knowledge, which I read about on a local blog this morning. It'll be good library fodder, despite our local library being sort of all bedouin at the moment.

Scoped out dinosaur banks for Eryn on line.

Finished reading Book 7, The Vile Village, of a Series of Unfortunate Events to Eryn, and decided that for Halloween I may just use some marker to finish off the one eyebrow effect, draw an eyeball tattoo on my ankle, and go as the villain Count Olaf.

Agreed to be Cookie Queen's videographer for some school or work project. I need to rewatch Porn Wars so I'm capable of providing appropriate artistic direction. I think I'll encourage a scene in LissyJo's favorite examination room.

Watched a movie with Pooteewheet - well, an hour of a movie, we never finish them - over a glass of Jameson. Lately we've seen In Bruges and Be Kind Rewind, both of them enjoyable, although Be Kind Rewind could have been more funny and less sentimental.

Worried about McCain's "time out", Palin's "first" meeting with foreign statesmen, what I'm going to do when we're in a recession next Monday like Palin asserts we might be, and what I'm going to do with the $2,295 to $4,590 of my portion of bad national and potentially international debt. Given that I already had a renter skip out on rent and file bankruptcy to the tune of about $9,000 after expenses, that should have pre-purchased my portion and my brother's portion. At least part of that debt (renting the trash bin and storage) was tax deductible.